leee

I saw this on Friday, and Broken Wings is simply astounding. Costumes, makeup, music, set design, lighting, it was such a sensory feast. I'm also a sucker for choreography where the dancers continue to perform as the curtain drops. Between this and the MADCAP encore, it's been an incredible couple weeks of ballet for me.

(One thing that gave me pause was Diego's wedding scene, when the skeletons were shouting out random Spanish phrases. It was funny at first but the longer it drew out the less comfortable it became.)

Agreed as well on Carmen being a bit of an afterthought, though this is the jazziest I've ever seen SFB get, and I did appreciate that Jen Stahl's solo was, for lack of a better word, so butch. 

Sorry for the double-post but I wanted to make sure that it doesn't get lost:

Hi folks, I'm visiting NYC in May and have two Second Ring seats to the 5/23 (Tuesday) Robbins/Balanchine III performance. Unfortunately, scheduling conflicts have precluded being able to attend -- if anyone is interested in buying the tickets please DM me! Thanks so much.

On 2/2/2023 at 1:11 AM, pherank said:

If you subscribed to the 2020 digital season you would have seen For Pixie as part of the "opening night gala" video. It was danced by Dores Andre and Joe Walsh, with costumes by Lauren Strongin,

I unfortunately had issues with the digital season, especially with how it was implemented, so I barely watched anything during the pandemic.

Anyway, a question I kept wondering about: does anyone know if MADCAP's spoken dialogue was prerecorded, or if Jen was saying the lines live? I assume the former.

15 minutes ago, Phrenchphry11 said:

So far I've seen C and A as well.  (Program B next week!)

MADCAP is totally spectacular.  Dani Rowe has such an endlessly creative, quirky, and unique style, and I'm so curious about her choreographic process and what goes through her mind to get such amazing inspiration.  And yet, despite all the quirkiness, she still has a way to make the movement feel so poignant and poetic at the same time.  Such a revelation, she's definitely the current/active choreographer I feel most excited about.  (I remember her coming onto my radar when I saw For Pixie). I hope she's got lots more in store for SFB!

MADCAP has such a way of drawing out some of the best qualities of its dancers too.  Probably some of the best performances I've seen from Jennifer Stahl and Tiit Helimets.  

 

I've liked most of the other pieces.  As others mentioned, some works are more creative than others.  But I really do hope MADCAP makes it into the full-time rep, and maybe even picked up by other companies.  If the purpose of next@90 is to explore the future of ballet, MADCAP definitely hits the mark.

Agreed on all counts! Even with performances I'm enjoying, sometimes I have to corral my attention back to the dancing, but not so with MADCAP. Riveting from curtain to curtain, and in between spellbinding and ingenious, joyous and demented. I don't think I ever saw For Pixie, but from now on I'll be keeping an eye out for Dani Rowe's name.

3 hours ago, pherank said:

Enjoy, Leee!

Tonight was absolutely thrilling! A salve for my soul.

I'm waiting for the train right now as I'm on my way to program A, although I did attend the premiere of Cc last week. At first I wondered if I had been so starved of beautiful dance that I was happy to witness ANY ballet, but then Violin Concerto left me largely unmoved. So with that in mind, I feel more confident in saying that Kin was lovely, and Blanc's piece was spectacular (it certainly didn't hurt that I loved the music too).

On 8/1/2019 at 7:32 PM, pherank said:

I don't know how your tastes run, but I really want to see the new Ratmansky (The Seasons), and new works by Marston and McIntyre have the potential to be good, but one never really knows.  😉

"Die Toteninsel" was easily my favorite from this past season.

Any recommendations of contemporary fare for 2020?

The name of Program 3 sounds apt, as do 5 and 6. However, I just saw Etudes this past season, I didn't find "Snowblind" interesting in the least, and am generally not a fan of Ratmansky.

Certainly not short, and maybe old news, but if you have SF Public Library card, you can watch full-length performances of The Little Mermaid and The Nutcracker through the SFPL website.

On 5/3/2019 at 9:06 PM, pherank said:

Frances (with baby bump) getting "help and inspiration" from Dores:

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bw7dxQ8gDvF/

I wonder what it's like to have your own personal peanut gallery.

If you don't mind a duffer's opinion, my erstwhile general culture blog on dance and ballet. I also achieved some internet renown for my SYTYCD blogging, but that was another lifetime.

And apropos of the discussion some pages back about the social ramifications of the pointe shoe, I fondly recall a conference where one presenter described ballet dancers as cyborgs, since they use technology to enhance and augment their biological abilities. So, the transhumanist (if not specifically feminist) reading of ballet does exist.

Thanks all for the responses and recommendations!

I've finished Apollo's Angels, and SFB does rate a mention... in the author's biography. SIGH.

I've just finished the book and generally enjoyed it -- I'm qualifying "generally" because of the epilogue, of course.

I'm a neophyte compared to the other contributors on the board, and so as a historiographic survey AA is a useful starting point(e) (first position?), if you'll permit me the puns. Homans' preferences for ballet as restrained, graceful, and elevated -- in short, an endeavor of elitism -- shows through enough of her prose throughout the book and early on enough that I knew that her tastes and mine diverge. This difference in taste largely isn't an issue (I was disheartened to read that Robbins dismissed Philip Glass's music, as I count "Glass Pieces" as my favorite dance of his) and I thus knew well enough to view her assertions not as gospel truth but as the stories she as a neoclassicist wants to tell -- that is, until that epilogue. There, her aesthetic judgments take on an aggressively ethical dimension that casts a pall on the rest of the book. The tone of the epilogue actually soured my mood when I reached it, partly because for me the most vital and appealing aspects of ballet are the ones she takes as signs of its decline as an art form of today. I adore contemporary ballet for its obvious athleticism (which I might argue for beyond a mere democratization / vulgarization of taste, and connect it more to minimalism in music) and its lack of emotional affect (here I think I should familiarize myself with Tudor), the combination of which delivers a pure dance experience unencumbered by narrative, bathos, etc.

(I also have an immediate skepticism for people who announce that an art form is dead or dying and pine for some inaccessible, halcyon past, which to me invariably comes from a reactionary reading of history, but this is a prejudice of mine, and I also can't argue that we're clearly living in a day and age where ballet is a niche and not mainstream form.)

All this, and her unnecessary and unfair dismissal of Hodson's reconstructed Rite -- a "travesty"? Really?

I also wouldn't describe her prose as beautiful, since Homans largely writes in the transparent register of a historian; any passages of rhapsodizing are too fleeting (or, if I'm being honest, simply not to my tastes) to have made an impression on me as good writing. (There were a few places, however, where the editing failed her; I believe during the Soviet chapters where her diction gets mired down in the plodding lumpenstyle that wouldn't be out of place in a dram-balet.)

18 minutes ago, nanushka said:

There is a thread dedicated to Apollo's Angels here:

 

Thanks! My search skills seem to have eluded me. 

I'm just about finishing Apollo's Angels and have some opinions about Homans' epilogue... would this be an appropriate thread to air my grievances or should I start a new thread specific to AA?

22 hours ago, pherank said:

New York will never be conscious of anything outside of New York

If this thread produces nothing else but this delightfully piquant turn of phrase, it will still have been worth it.

I'm reading Apollo's Angels and have reached what's probably my favorite artistic era ('20s modernism), namely the Ballet Russe and even namely Le Sacre, all of which I'm eating up. But I got to thinking that I'd love to see a book-length history of SFB, since it IS the first major American ballet company that nevertheless seems to be ignored when the subject is American ballet since it's so far from the NY epicenter. Is there anything out there at all on SFB?

I just had the bright idea to check the bibliographic section of the SFB wikipedia entry. Has anyone read any of these?

23 hours ago, Josette said:

If it is the bridesmaid that got to dance a short solo, it was Julia Rowe.  I can always spot her from a distance and in a group because she moves so distinctly.  And that is Julia with the lighter brown hair on the far right ( vantage point of looking at the photo).

 

Yes, that's her! Thank you!

I went for opening night, and while I really liked the first 10-20 minutes (up to and including when the Poet first meets TLM) and the ending image is chilling and beautiful, I found a lot of the stuff in between to be protracted repetition. I've been reading Apollo's Angels and its discussion about the narrative limitations of dance/ballet seem relevant: I spent a lot of time trying to figure out where in the story we were at any given time instead of letting the emotional affect carry me forward. (Then again, I think the narrative pacing in Frankenstein was a lot brisker and thus more engaging.)

HOWEVER: I've never sympathized as much to YYT's dancing as when she plays TLM -- and all it took was flexed feet and knocked knees.

Other notes:

• TLM's pants seemed to have made the partnering a lot more challenging than usual, as some of the lifts looked unusually labored.
• I think I saw YYT crying during the bows!
• I don't get what TLM sees in the Prince. Not much of a catch, if you ask me. So many other fish in the sea.
• Who was the dancer with light brown hair in the pink Jackie Kennedy dress? She gave great comedic face.

On 4/14/2019 at 7:24 PM, pherank said:

But she's not an angry person - more of an imp, by nature. That's probably her 'game face' that you've noticed.

 

More about Dores:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PGRtBAHpgc

I didn't mean to suggest that she's angry, only that her game face is one of stern, imperious hauteur -- which I think she uses to great effect!

I've been seeing Dores Andre on a lot of SFB's promotion materials this season, seems like she's getting pushed as the (angry) face of the company now.

19 hours ago, Josette said:

I just purchased a ticket for opening night. I cannot miss this cast! 

Same here!

My first post in this forum!

I didn't care for Rodeo, probably because I don't care for Aaron Copeland. It's hard for me to take something seriously on an artistic level that was once used to sell beef.

I had no expectation of Die Toteninsel, but the deeply ominous atmosphere of doom had me entranced. Loved this.

Bjork Ballet... boy. It has its moments, but the choreography misses the mark by a wide margin. A rave is IMO supposed to be a modern example of ecstatic dancing, but because of the precariousness of that platform, whoever's on top of it has to be mindful with their dancing. Where was the abandon, the energy? Combined with the staging where dancers clumped around each other, it was an entirely underwhelming effect, and having it set to Hyperballad underscores just how small and sparse that section feels. (I was sort of hoping for/expecting something like the rush of seeing a huge crowd of dancers like at the end of Etudes, which I saw a few weeks ago and was floored by.)

@pherank thanks for the response!

That's a shame that I missed out on such a well-received Quixote! Ah well, at the very least such effusive praise will fix it in my mind for 2020.

The proximity of working choreographers and dancers is definitely something that leaves me reeling; not exactly specific to dance, but I once attended a pre-ballet Q&A fore Firebird (Ballet San Jose) where the AD casually mentioned being at a party where none other than Igor Stravinsky was holding court. IGOR STRAVINSKY!

Of the Ballet Russes ballets, I've seen Le Sacre, L'apres midi (both Nijinsky's and Robbins'), and Les Noces (that's the "small handbag" one, yes?). I've seen SFB perform Agon, though I struggle to remember anything about it (according to my blog post, I enjoyed it).

I have a ticket to see SFB's program 6. As for program 5, I've seen the Trey McIntire during Unbound last year, and I was impressed with Benjamin Freemantle in particular; the other two entries I have doubts about. Point taken about Yuan Yuan in Little Mermaid -- do you suggest waiting for a flash sale? When will the casting announcements be made?

I've seen Shostakovich Trilogy, and I think I liked it? But I hardly remember much of it, and given my tepid response to From Foreign Lands, I've mostly concluded that Ratmansky (and neoclassical generally) isn't to my taste. (As to why I like contemporary, I think it foregrounds athleticism in a way that translates viscerally for me, and so the restraint and grace of neoclassical works is harder for me to engage with.)

Incidentally, I've been operating under the mistaken impression that Balanchine was French. I'm sure Diaghilev's ghost must be pleased quite pleased there.